Truth telling
This election cycle reveals the deep divide in the U.S. No matter who wins in November, those of us who are concerned about creating a better world have a lot of work to do. Fully half the people in our country have embraced candidates who vilify other human beings, support draconian laws assaulting basic human rights, and speak glibly of executing political rivals. Rambling falsehoods and dark descriptions of daily life abound at rallies and in what passes for news coverage in an ever partisan and fragmented media world.
It is easy to think that Donald Trump is the source of these problems. Certainly, he has taken conspiracy theories and outright lying to new dimensions. He has promoted the “Big Lie” that the previous election was stolen from him and he persistently denies facts. At the same time his crude, coarse, bullying makes him a good target for our frustrations and fears.
Yet he is far from the real challenge we face if we are to create a country that lives with respect for its people, for life on the planet, and in harmony with other nations. While it is easy to shake our heads at those who accept the lies of Trump and his ilk, it is far more difficult to look at the lies we have embraced as a culture and a people.
The lies of election frauds and pizza gates emerged in a culture that has long lied to itself about the force, violence, and destruction it has waged to protect power and privilege. The origin story of the US that has seeped into the consciousness of most of us is one that barely mentions genocide. We have yet to grapple with the truth that unless you are indigenous, we all live on stolen land. We distort our history and hide from our consciousness the extent to which our nation participates in support of death and destruction. We twist reality saying we go to war to make peace. We support dictators and assassinations of elected leaders in the name of democracy. We name our nuclear missiles, peacekeepers, and see no irony.
We equally hide from ourselves those who have resisted the dehumanization and destruction of our culture, erasing them from collective memories or sanitizing those whose names we cannot ignore.
It should come as no surprise that people are able to deny reality. We are as a people practiced at it.
It was in recognition of this capacity to evade the harsh realities that make our way of life possible that Dr. Martin Luther King called us to a new level of “maturity.” He hoped that we would find the wisdom to look honestly at ourselves. He argued that we earn to listen to our enemies for “if we are able to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves… we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.”
King felt that the war in Vietnam called us to find a new maturity as a people, to have the capacity to look honestly and fully at our actions, to learn from them and to move in different direction.
As he feared, it is a maturity we have yet to achieve.
If we are to find that maturity in this political moment, it will in part be because of the courage and clarity brought to us by visionary writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates. His new book, The Message, is an effort to speak truths long buried in lies, deceit and denial. Like King, he is calling us to see the world more clearly, from the point of view of those who are suffering from the abuses of power, the violence of our bombs and bullets. And he is urging us to speak from a center of moral truths about our longing for a better world. The future depends on our courage to engage each other in ways that enable us to grow to life.